There are a lot of different ways to raise kids, and while you can prepare yourself, a lot of the job, you just learn on the fly.

Early in his parenting career, Bernie Feldstein figured out how to keep his two kids, Vickie and Michael, happy and honest with something he called “Amnesty Day.” Once a year, Feldstein would give his kids the chance to confess to anything wrong that they did that year – the catch being that if they confessed on this precise day, they wouldn’t be punished. Feldstein says often, amnesty day was full of surprises.

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BERNIE FELDSTEIN: Well I was reading somewhere about the value of confession in the Catholic Church, how good people feel after they confess. And I said, “We ought to have something like that. You walk around carrying guilt and you just get rid of it. No wonder those guys are so successful! They have this real formula you know in the Catholic Church: You confess, no matter what is it what you did. You’re okay and you start over, you get a clean slate.

VICKIE FELDSTEIN: I would guess too that it drove you crazy to not know what happened to some things and your sneaking suspicion was that it was MIchael, but it was so unsettling to not really have an answer, ‘cause a lot of them were about edible things that disappeared… (laughs)

BERNIE FELDSTEIN: For me, I just thought it was a very effective thing to do.

We had, as you might recall, in our family an Amnesty Day, every once in a while…

VICKIE FELDSTEIN: I don’t think I needed Amnesty Day!

BERNIE FELDSTEIN: Well, your brother did…

VICKIE FELDSTEIN: How often were these amnesty days?

BERNIE FELDSTEIN: About twice a year I think.

VICKIE FELDSTEIN: And were you ever really surprised by the confessions?

BERNIE FELDSTEIN: Oh yeah, I was surprised by the sidewalk broom. You remember the sidewalk-broom? The sidewalk-broom had disappeared from the garage. It was like, who steals a sidewalk broom? I mean is the DPW short of brooms? I don’t get it! I happened to be the only guy in the neighborhood who owned a sidewalk broom!

Anyway, on Amnesty Day he said, “The sidewalk-broom.” And I said, “What?! What did you do with it?” He said, “I didn’t do anything, I went to Perlstein’s yard, how did you get to the Perlstein’s yard.

“We threw it there.”

“Why the hell did you throw it on the Perlstein’s yard?” – which was behind us.

“‘Cause it was on fire!”

“Oh, it was on fire? I should have known that’s what happens to sidewalk brooms! How did the goddamn sidewalk broom get on fire?”

“Well we were trying to beat out the fire when the leaves caught fire…”

“How did the leaves catch fire?”

“We raked them up and put them in that barrel and we lit it and then it tipped over and we couldn’t reach it with a hose so we beat it out with a sidewalk broom, but it didn’t work, the broom caught fire so we threw the broom over the fence to the neighbor’s yard so you wouldn’t see it.”

Bernie Feldstein spoke with his daughter Vickie Feldstein at the San Francisco StoryCorps booth in the Contemporary Jewish Museum. His interview was facilitated by Sophie Simon-Ortiz and edited by KALW’s Erica Mu. To learn more about how you can record your own story, check out the StoryCorps website.